I don’t know who coined the term, but I first learned about “radical inclusion” from a very talented German systemic constellation facilitator by the name of Albrecht Mahr. Albrecht is a medical doctor who specializes in psychosomatic medicine, psychoanalysis, and systems therapy. He’s been teaching systemic constellation work around the world for many years and I was fortunate to be the recipient of his teachings first hand at a training this past spring in Germany. I’ve come to understand that radical inclusion can be experienced at the broad societal or family system level if one looks at the big picture, and it can be experienced at the individual transpersonal level, as discussed in this blog entry.
Who is Missing?
Radical inclusion is finding room in your heart for those you would rather shun, reject, ignore, or put out of your conscious mind and your life. This is especially important when the individuals are members of your own family system. Radical inclusion is an adamant stance that everyone has a right to belong to the family system regardless of what they may have done or not done. It plays a huge role in the healing of individuals and their family systems.
Healing the Whole
In systemic constellation work, there is an energetic assumption that the wellness of the individual is integrally linked to the wellness of the family system. Family, community, and societal systems are inflexible about radical inclusion when balancing or healing the greater system. Radical inclusion is both a controversial and reassuring concept that allows healing resolution to occur. It might be referred to as a universal law that has shown up in thousands of systemic family constellations. It encourages family members to acknowledge, understand, and accept their own context within the balancing and healing of the greater family system.
Shifting Unhealthy Relationships
Healing is about changing unhealthy relationships to healthy relationships within the family system. It’s about taking steps toward healing family emotional wounds. Unhealthy relationships may come about because of narrow perceptions, often developed consciously or unconsciously in childhood and carried into adulthood. The child’s deep inner self only knows that in some way it must protect itself at all costs from annihilation. Survival is the motivator behind much of our early emotional response patterns developed in utero and in early childhood. We run into difficulties in life when we carry these same childhood emotional response patterns into adulthood and into our adult relationships. “I didn’t get enough,” “I’m not good enough,” “I’m left out,” “I will die,” “I’m alone,” “I’m not wanted,” “I’m not lovable,” “I was born to serve her needs,” “I have to be good to be loved,” “I have to be perfect to be loved,” …and so on.
Transgenerational Impact
In one situation, the child doesn’t understand why his father is mentally and physically abusive. He doesn’t understand that grandfather was mentally and physically abusive to his son, your father, and that is why your father is the way he is. Then again, the child doesn’t understand that great grandfather was forced to watch his family beaten and killed by the ruling oppressors of the day and he was emotionally scarred for life. Great grandfather didn’t have anything to give emotionally to his own children, which included your grandfather, and he resorted to corporal punishment when his children did wrong. An unresolved emotional wound exists in the family system. The child can’t understand the transgenerational emotional inheritance that flows down through the generations impacting his own life. All of this emotional baggage is carried into adulthood and you’re now feeling like a victim of life. You also feel anger at your father and emotional distance between you. Radical inclusion means finding compassion for your father who was mentally and physically abusive to you when you were a child. It’s important to understand that your father did the best he could for you emotionally given his own emotional woundedness and now it’s time for you to parent and self-sooth yourself. Your father gave you life and as an adult you cannot expect any more from him.
In another case, the child doesn’t understand why her mother was cold, distant, manipulative, and sometimes frightening. She doesn’t understand that her mother’s mother, your grandmother, lost three of her siblings and two of her own children to early death. Grandmother was energetically and emotionally turned toward the dead children in her family system and she had nothing to give emotionally to her own children, including your mother. The child doesn’t understand that grandmother buried her sorrow and grief and never had the opportunity to express it. An unresolved wound exists in the family system. As the living adult, you have a feeling that you didn’t get enough from your mother and you don’t know how to express your emotions. Radical inclusion means finding compassion for your mother, even if she was cold, distant, manipulative, and sometimes frightening when you were a child. It’s important to gain an understanding that your mother did the best she could emotionally for you given her own emotional woundedness and it’s now time for you to begin parenting and self-soothing yourself. Your mother gave you life and you cannot expect any more from her. Radical inclusion wants you to understand at a deep inner soul level how you fit energetically and spiritually within the bigger picture of the family system.
The Ego and Separation
Radical inclusion is finding compassion deep within to see those who may have hurt you in some way as having an equal right to belong in the family system. It is letting go of the desire to separate from them or reject them. Radical inclusion is felt as a threat by the ego, that part of you that loves the status quo, the familiar, and a feeling of safety. The ego will want to separate away from those it perceives to be different or views as a threat in some way. It’s in minimizing the impact of ego that one is able to live radical inclusion.
Accept What Is
Radical inclusion does not involve forgetting what happened. It asks you to acknowledge what is in your family system, to take the time to understand the family system that created the emotional responses of your mother and/or father, and to find a place in your heart for your parents. You can’t change the past, but in the present you can change yourself, the story you tell yourself, and your belief system.
Holding Mother and Father in Your Heart
It’s important to understand that you can’t have full wellness if you don’t have a healthy relationship with your mother and father. What you reject in your mother or father you will also reject in yourself. If you reject a part of yourself you cannot have full wellness, symptoms will occur physically, emotionally, mentally, spiritually, or relationally with others.
Radical inclusion develops through compassion. Compassion (empathetic warmth for the other) falls into a duality spectrum with distant coldness at the other extreme. Compassion doesn’t come naturally for many of us, and it often needs to be learned through seeking to change. Individual and family healing requires that we open our hearts to others in the family system to heal unhealthy relationships. We all have the capacity to open our heart to the other, to shift from coldness to warmth, and to feel deep compassion.
Holding the Victim and Perpetrator in Your Heart
In order to heal yourself or your family system you must have the capacity to open your heart to both the victim and the perpetrator. Compassion is finding the inner capacity to understand that it is only through your birth circumstances and your narrow childhood emotional response pattern that you find yourself judging your parents. You see yourself as the victim and view your parent(s) as the perpetrator(s). It’s having the understanding that we each have a role to play in the spiritual development and growth of all humanity. Sometimes you get to be the victim and sometimes you’re the perpetrator.
During childhood, our parents leave their emotional imprint on us and we tend to feel like the victim if difficult emotional events occurred. That means you set your parents up as the perpetrators. When that is the case, you generally remember the worst dozen things your parents did or said to you. You continue to tell yourself this story over and over until you believe it is the whole truth. The truth is that somehow you made it reasonable well out of childhood and into adulthood. It may not have been the life you wanted for yourself, but it was the life you were meant to live until the time comes that the family system wounds are healed. You develop spiritually through the experiences you live. Radical inclusion is being able to equitably hold in your heart both the victim (you) and the perpetrator (your parents or any other family member you would prefer to shun), and this can be a very difficult thing to do.
This radical inclusion goes far beyond the realm of your parents. Anytime someone does something to another, and the individual and/or their family system suffers in some way, the victim and the perpetrator become part of one another’s family system.
Living Radical Inclusion
In my own region of the world, I lift up as an example of radical inclusion and compassion the response of a father to the murder of his beloved 17-year old son Jason. Dale Lang turned his personal tragedy into a lesson on compassion for the world around him. Jason was shot in 1999 by a 14-year old, who had been bullied, in a Columbine-style copycat high school shooting. Dale has been a spokesperson against bullying ever since the death of his son. He speaks of his faith, of forgiveness, of changing lives, and of compassion. He speaks about the irony of his son’s death, a youth actively against bullying. Jason was a caring individual who befriended other students who were being picked on by others.
Years after his son’s death, Dale Lang was quoted in the national Globe and Mail newspaper saying, “At the end of the day, the whole point that I’m making is that we have to be compassionate people who actually care about others, even the people who are tough for us to like.” As Canadians reeled from the shock of the murder, Jason’s parents turned their backs on bitterness and going inward with their pain. They turned outward with compassion for their son’s murderer and advocated for all those who are bullied or marginalized in some way by society. Dale Lang went outward with his pain, choosing life over death, love over hate, forgiveness over revenge, and compassion over cold divisiveness. Dale Lang recognized that his son’s murderer was part of his own family system. He recognized the family wound that needed to be healed. Dale Lang lives radical inclusion.
Do you have the capacity to live compassion and radical inclusion in your own life?
